


faults and cracks

by slybrunette



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Communication Failure, Emotional Constipation, Established Friends With Benefits, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Series Rewrite
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2019-12-18 06:26:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18244223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: change one thing - one tiny, insignificant thing - and the rest will fall like dominoes.OR:the haven au where duke and nathan have been in a badly-navigated "relationship" for the better part of a year by the time audrey parker rolls into town. episode by episode.





	1. welcome to haven

**Author's Note:**

> For Gintare.

On Tuesday morning, the boat springs a leak. 

“Nathan, I swear to god, if you’re messing with me - ” Duke starts. But he’s not. There’s a crack along the bathroom ceiling, water drip-dropping onto the pile of clothes that used to be Nathan’s only clean, dry options for the day. Duke gestures something exasperated, only then seeming to realize he’s still holding a spatula. “When did that even happen?” 

He shrugs. “Must’ve been this morning.”

Duke looks at him like he’s insane. 

“You’re the boat expert,” Nathan adds, shaking out his shirt. It’s a lost cause. His jeans less so. He can run by the house before work, change there, like he should’ve done. Should’ve showered there too, for that matter. 

Duke snatches the shirt out of his hands. “Don’t even think about it.” 

“It’s fine,” he protests. 

“No, it’s fifty degrees. In June. Because that’s normal.” That last is bitingly sarcastic, even for him, and not for no reason. The last few days the weather’s been - strange. Erratic, almost, like it can’t make up its mind. Duke disappears into the bedroom, into the chest of drawers he keeps his clothes in, and Nathan trails along hesitantly. He doesn’t like where this is going. Likes it even less when Duke tosses him a sweater.

It’s a pullover instead of the cardigans Duke favors, the color of oatmeal, and Nathan tosses it right back at him, his eyebrows knit together. Now who’s insane? 

“Oh, come on - ”

“I have to go to _work_.” 

“Yeah, is there a dress code I’m not aware of?” He tosses the sweater right back at Nathan, hits him center mass with what he can guess might’ve been a little more force than the first time, and walks away, back into the galley. Nathan tries to remember if he’s ever seen Duke wear this thing and comes up with nothing, even though it smells like - well, like him. Spice, the incense that’s been burning off and on, the soap he uses. Nathan grits his teeth. Duke keeps right on talking. “You wanna freeze, fine by me, but it’s not gonna be my fault.” 

“Just as long as your own ass is covered,” Nathan says, fighting words even to his own ears, but Duke doesn’t take the bait, and that makes him almost halfway regret them. It’s too early for this. Half past six and they’re arguing over a damn sweater. 

Stupid. 

Everything about this. Stupid.

He drops his towel and pulls on his jeans, listens to Duke’s bare feet on the floor, the sizzling on the stove, the tension starting to break as Duke picks up humming something low and unfamiliar. It’s just a sweater. It’s fine. It doesn’t have to mean anything. They’ve ended up in the wrong clothes before, in each other’s clothes. It’s a hazard of - whatever this is. 

Duke gives him a cursory glance when he hovers in the doorway for long enough, frustration sparking and then dying in the same half second, but he doesn’t otherwise react. Duke’s good at that. At not reacting, at holding his cards close to his chest when he wants to. And where Nathan’s concerned, he always seems to want to. 

“Coffee’s over there,” Duke says, turning something over in a pan, something decidedly not pancakes and thus uninteresting. Nathan snags the mug off the counter, sniffing it, and he can feel Duke roll his eyes behind him. “I made sure it’s lukewarm.” 

“Did you drug test it?” 

“Hilarious.” 

Nathan hides the slight smile that springs to his lips behind the rim of the mug. It’s good, but then Duke knows the way he likes his coffee by now, has it down to a fine science. It should be concerning, but convenience wins out. “Why’re you up anyway?” 

“Oh, right, your phone,” he fumbles in his pocket, stops just short of tossing said phone at him, screen lit up with unread messages. Nathan groans. “Someone’s about to have a very busy day.” 

There’s an initial call for assistance and then an addendum with more details, but the gist of it is that there’s a dead man out by Tuwiuwok Bluff, probably found by early morning bird-watchers, maybe a particularly determined jogger, and the Chief’s en route. More good news. He flips his phone shut and gulps down some of his coffee. It makes Duke hiss, even though that’s the exact reason he keeps tempering it with cold water. 

“Dead body?” 

“Not your business.”

Duke shrugs. There’s an unpleasant quirk to his mouth that Nathan notices but doesn’t have time for, and it’s a relief when that too disappears. “I’ll just find out on my own.” 

Nathan chooses not to interrogate just how that’ll happen. It’s a small town with a low murder rate. Gossip gets around fast. Even if it seems to make its way to Duke a lot faster than average. “Don’t you have a leak to fix?” 

“I’ve got a guy,” Duke says, sounding surprisingly unconcerned for someone who’d flipped out at the mere mention of a leak. Duke’s always got a guy. Guns, booze, boat repair; you name it. “I’ve gotta do a supply run soon anyway. Might as well make sure she’s in tip-top shape before I go.” 

His ears perk. “Go?” 

“Yeah.” Duke keeps his back turned, line of his shoulders tense. Like he’s stumbled them straight into a conversation he didn’t want to have and can’t get out of. Nathan can’t feel his stomach churning in the usual way, but if he could he imagines that’s what it’d be doing. “It’s just for a few days. I’ve got - stuff.” 

“Stuff,” Nathan bites off. 

It sounds a lot more bitter than he’d like it to, than he’s okay with, but there’s a part of him that still tastes thirteen year old disappointment every time Duke decides to skip town for a few days, a few weeks, sometimes with warning and sometimes not. He can’t figure out if knowing he’s going in the first place is better than not, if it’s worth having to deal with the idea that he’s currently sitting on a ship that’s likely got smuggled goods in its cargo hold and he’s doing fuck all about it. 

He still hasn’t figured out what kind of cop that makes him.

What kind of person. 

Duke’s looking at him again. “I’ll be back.” 

Something in Nathan chafes at the unasked for reassurance.“What’re you smuggling this time? Guns? Drugs?” He watches Duke’s hand white knuckle around the pan he’s holding, pushes on in spite of his better judgement, or maybe because of it. “People?”

“I don’t know, Nate,” Duke says, with enough malice to turn that childhood nickname into something ugly, “I’m pretty sure that’s none of your business.”

What’s left of his coffee turns sour on his tongue.

He doesn’t stay for breakfast. 

 

 

The stretch of beach leading up to the Bluffs is still cordoned off with crime scene tape when he gets there, half a dozen or so officers up by their cars. Stan has a clipboard and witness statements and a nervous eye on the Chief.

“He’s - ”

Stan pauses, to allow the sound of the Chief laying into the two twentysomethings that make up their entire forensics department to wash over them, and then gives him a ‘what can you do’ shrug whilst somehow maintaining the kind of good humor that Nathan can’t seem to manage on his best days. 

Especially not where the Chief is involved. 

“Think we’re just about wrapped here, Nathan,” the Chief tells him, a hundred feet or so down the beach, before he’s even finished ducking past the crime scene tape. He’s chewing gum with some amount of force and, not for the first time, Nathan wonders why his father picked now of all times to quit smoking. Now, when they suddenly find themselves in need of a good coroner on a routine basis. “Heard there’s a wreck out on Route 7, maybe they could use you there.” 

In other words, _go away_.

Nathan is past the point of that bothering him like it used to. Even further past the point of letting that cow him and he closes the rest of the distance between them easily. “How’d he die?” 

“Fall, probably.” The Chief gives him a brief, evaluative glance, then squints up at the cliffs looming above them. “Storm rolled through last night, would’ve made the terrain up there even more uneven than it already was. Did us all a favor, not making us chase him down.” 

Nathan’s never excelled at spatial reasoning, but even he can tell that the body’s in the wrong place for it to be something as cut and dry as that. Too far out. A simple fall would’ve dropped him closer inland. And yet. The Chief’s had it out for Jonas Lester since they got word he’d escaped from prison, and that means this is an open and shut case no matter how improbable the conclusions are. 

He thinks about arguing, he really does, but he’s just spent his morning arguing, and it’s not worth all the sniping the Chief’ll do even after he’s blown him off for lack of a better explanation. 

Been there, done that.

“Accident’s not gonna sort itself out,” the Chief says, and Nathan goes, because apparently today he’s that kind of cop. The kind that sits on knowledge that something is wrong and does nothing with that information. Not with Duke, and not with this. 

 

 

About two miles out from his destination, he hits a different wreck. 

The crack in the road is substantial, enough so that he palms the radio as he’s pulling the Bronco to a stop, rattling off an approximate location and a request for a crew to come out and cordon things off ‘til they get around to a more permanent solution. It terminates at the guardrail, dented to hell where the little red sedan dangling off the cliff had slammed into it, almost like it’s goal was to chase the car off the road and nothing more. 

It had done that job admirably. 

Nathan thinks about stepping out of the shower to water dripping above his head, about the jagged line cutting through the ceiling of Duke’s boat, and tries not to draw parallels. 

He picks his way over to the car with more caution than is perhaps needed. 

The woman inside is unharmed but not unarmed, a fact which he finds out not long after he pulls her out of the car. She pulls a gun on him, without even so much as a thanks for saving my life, without even a shred of hesitation, and while his first instinct is aggravation there’s amusement hiding under that, at the way she shakes off a near death experience and comes out of it with reflexes to match his own and then some.

FBI Agent Audrey Parker shows him her badge, commanders his vehicle, and slams his fingers in the door then spends half the ride over to the crime scene staring at the rapidly purpling nail of his index finger. He bends it out of view underneath the curve of the steering wheel and she tries to pretend she was never looking at all, having stopped asking if he was okay after the second time he shrugged her off. He’s fine. His biggest concern, he thinks, is that Duke’s going to interrogate him about it as soon as he sees him again - and then he remembers that that might not be any time soon, after how well this morning had gone. Might be healed by the next time, for all he knows. 

They’re like that, sometimes. 

Nathan takes her to see the Chief, to see Jonas Lester’s body still laid out on the beach, minutes from being loaded into the back of the truck and whisked off, and feels that hint of amusement creep back up on him again watching her point out missed evidence in the form of a scrap of paper lodged in his jacket pocket and joke her way through the jurisdictional pissing contest the Chief seems intent on having.

She notices the distance too, pokes the same hole in the Chief’s theory that Nathan had bit his tongue on, and it’s worth the brief stint on the other side of her gun just to see the Chief bristle like that.

 

 

They find two sets of footprints and a gun up on the Bluffs.

“You drink, Detective?” Parker asks, while they’re picking their way back down to the beach, a little extra pep in her step that hadn’t been there on the climb up.

“Pardon?”

“I hope so,” she continues on, like she hadn’t heard him. “Because when we solve this case and stick it to your old man? You’re buying.” 

 

 

He thinks about it, on the ride into town. 

Parker asks questions, about the cuisine, about the car, about the shifting sandstone that had sent her car flying and the brightly colored buildings that line the streets of downtown, so different than what she’s used to back in Boston. The role of tour guide has never come naturally to him, but in the few short hours he’s known her they’ve managed to establish an easy banter that he sinks into without much in the way of effort. They work well together, that much he can already tell, and for a moment he thinks - 

Nathan can’t remember the last time anyone asked him out for drinks. Nathan can’t remember the last time anyone asked him anywhere, at least anywhere public, that wasn’t somehow work related. The Chief and his infrequent attempts to reach out, to repair what is beyond repair, notwithstanding. Duke and his offers of dinner and sex and other things, tucked away on the Rouge, notwithstanding. To his coworkers, he’s the Chief’s kid, the possible successor on the off chance his father ever quits, although Nathan is of the opinion the Chief will occupy that desk til he keels over in it twenty, thirty years down the road. To his friends - 

Well. 

Nathan has never been much for those. 

His last real friend left him for a decade to go gallivanting around the world without a word. His last real date had been the year after, the fall before he turned twenty four, with a girl who’d washed out of his class at academy, and that had turned out to be less a date and more a pointless exercise that his heart wasn’t in to begin with. 

His mother died. His father emotionally checked out of their relationship before Nathan was even out of the single digits. Duke left and came back and, he knows, will leave again inevitably, something he’s gradually forcing himself to make peace with every time he drives away from the marina and wonders if this is the last time he’ll see the Rouge in his rearview. 

There’s no point to any of it. 

To trying, to reaching out, to - 

They’d work well together, he thinks. But she’ll be gone in a few days, once they’ve wrapped up this case, and maybe that’s a blessing on its own. 

 

 

When Nathan was seven - arm still in a sling, not long removed from the sledding incident - his father took him to see a doctor over in Camden, a second opinion where the first was a shrug, a wary look at his father that Nathan is only now coming around to contextualizing. 

The doctor was nice, older, didn’t make a fuss even when Nathan kept kicking his numb feet against the exam table hard enough to make a racket you could hear all the way out in the waiting room; he knew that, of course, because his father told him, on the car ride back, chastising the seven year old he left alone in an exam room, smiling cartoon bears dressed in brightly colored overalls littering the wallpaper and a chair propped in the corner where he should’ve been. The doctor gave him a lollipop and stilled his feet, lowering himself down to Nathan’s level when he quietly explained how the loss of one sense often resulted in the overcompensation of the others. His sense of smell, of taste, might be better. His hearing would certainly improve. It would be just like his very own superpower. 

“Don’t go gettin’ ideas about jumping off any buildings to see if you can fly,” his father said, later, dead set on destroying any fantastical ideas he’d come out of that office with. “Won’t be anyone to catch you.”

Nathan had twisted the words over in his mind, pouting, and then told him - told him it would be okay, because Duke would be there and he’d take care of it, just like he had when Nathan had crashed his sled into that tree and seen bone and blood and stars. 

His father had laughed. 

 

 

 

Needless to say, Nathan doesn’t hear that truck coming his way until it’s blaring its horn less than fifty feet in front of his face, and by then he’s on the ground through no fault of his own. 

He thinks his father would laugh at that too. 

 

 

“Well, at least I can say I managed the impossible,” Parker says, sometime later, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets. On anyone else, it might read sheepish; on her, it just tells him the temperature has dropped off a few degrees again. Byproduct of the fog, maybe. A quick glance at his bare arm, sleeve pushed up to accommodate the layers of bandaging Eleanor had wrapped around his bicep - and the nasty case of road rash that had torn it up - shows a trail of gooseflesh. 

Reaction without sensation. 

Another fun quirk. 

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Finally gave you and your dad something in common.”

“You fracture his collarbone too?” he deadpans.

“You know what, that truck would’ve done a whole lot worse than a hairline fracture and some asphalt burn you apparently can’t even feel.” She chews her lip, then, and shifts her attention skyward. Actual sheepishness now. Telling her about his - numbness, nerve disorder, whatever - hadn’t been on his to-do list but Eleanor had called on him on his repeated insistence that he was fine and Parker wasn’t one to let that sort of thing lie. “But yeah. Pretty sure you’ll both be glad when I’m out of your hair.” 

He shrugs, jarring his shoulder without thinking about it. She doesn’t just mean because of the case though, at least on his end, and he knows it. “Don’t know. Keeps things from getting boring.” 

Parker laughs. “Honestly, I don’t think this town does boring.” 

Nathan thinks about how eerily quiet it gets downtown after the last of the shops close at ten, about the long walk to his car from the marina, passing by the same procession of sleepy fishermen starting their day, about how the most excitement the town used to see was a home run at a Sea Dogs game. 

About how, lately, that’s all started to change. 

“Give it a few days,” he says.

And hopes.

 

 

The gun trace comes back. 

He has to ask the officer on the other end of the line to repeat himself twice, just to be sure, but some small part of him thinks _of course_. Of course it would be Duke’s. Of course he’d end up in this position. 

“She knows something,” Parker says, the second the door to Marion Caldwell’s antiques store closes behind her, off and marching to his truck before he can hope to get a word in edgewise. “Ted, maybe not, but Marion was way too eager to tell me exactly where Conrad was last night. And to tell me he’s the ‘gentlest man she knows’. Didn’t you say he’s ex-military?” She throws a glance his way, only to come to an abrupt stop ten feet from the passenger side door, squinting up at him. “Your face says bad news.” 

“Gun you found was stolen,” he tells her, going for nonchalant. “Handled the report myself a week ago.” 

“Any idea by who?” 

He shrugs. 

Parker deflates a little, going to lean against the side of his truck with a huff of disappointment at their last best lead circling the drain. “Whose gun is it?” 

“Local smuggler.” Her eyebrows creep up her forehead. Maybe not the best descriptor he could’ve used if he wanted to avoid more questions but it’s the most impersonal. Parker’s FBI, he knows she couldn’t care less about one smuggler in the scheme of things - his own department can barely muster vague interest, the Chief included, and everyone in town knows exactly what kind of business Duke’s in - but it’s more ammo than she needs while she’s hungry for a lead to chase down. “He doesn’t have a body count.” 

“You’re sure?” 

“I’m sure.” 

“And he has an alibi?” 

“Yup.”

“An airtight one?”

Nathan weighs the risk of professional disaster against his increasing desire to stop talking about this. She’s only here for a few days. She’s a federal agent not a small-town cop prone to gossip. What could it hurt, he thinks. Stupidly. “I’m his alibi.”

“What was he in lock-up for?” 

“He wasn’t.” 

“ _Oh._ ”

He’s not sure which conclusion she’s elected to draw, but Jonas Lester’s time of death was somewhere between one and three am, and there’s only so many things Nathan could be doing at that hour of the night that involve another person. Sleeping being one of them, although judging by the small round ‘o’ of her mouth that’s not what she’s landed on. 

“Your father must love that,” she murmurs, quietly, then winces a little like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Because he’s a man or because he’s a criminal, Nathan doesn’t know. They’ve been fighting over Duke’s presence in his life since Nathan was a kid with one friend in the entire town; he’s pretty sure the Chief’s sticking point is less likely to be either of those things and more likely to be that he’s a Crocker. He’s never been any sort of fan of them. 

“Chief doesn’t know,” he concedes, an edge to it that’s half resentment, half raw nerves. 

He doesn’t want to beg to keep it that way.

But. 

“Well,” she pushes off the side of his truck, a hand landing on his shoulder, a hand he wouldn’t notice were it not for the blur of movement in his peripheral. He tries not to let his eyes linger. “Your secret’s safe with me. We still need to know who stole that gun though.” 

“I’ll talk to him.” Her mouth twists, an argument in the making. “You can drag him in for questioning if you want, if you feel like being bullshitted at for an hour. Be my guest.” 

“You know, I think I’d rather take my chances with Conrad again.” 

“Good call.” 

 

 

The day devolves from there. 

Conrad goes ghost, or as ghost as anyone can go in a town as small as Haven. He doesn’t pop up back at Marion’s shop and, after a brief call to the station to pull his address, they find no sign of him at his house either, driveway empty and lights off. Nathan settles for taking Parker on a drive of downtown, ostensibly to show her around, and they jointly pretend they’re not just looking for his car, for him, for a lead to take back to the Chief. Something to do. Something to act on. 

They find nothing. 

Nathan drops her off at a rental car dealership sometime after six. He leaves her with the directions to a B&B nearby written on the back of his business card, his cell number circled, and a vague promise to be back at the station by seven a.m., to call her if he hears anything back from forensics before then, and then he goes home. 

His mail is an ever-growing pile of bills and promotional offers that he mostly steps over on his way in the front door, three days worth of stuff that he flips through in a matter of seconds, most of it landing in the trash. His answering machine sits unblinking. The smoke detector in the hallway chirps in thirty second intervals, batteries gone bad sometime in the last few days. He doesn’t know when. He should know when, though, and isn’t that the problem.

Remembering when the last time he slept in his own bed instead of in Duke’s, instead of stretched out on the couch in his office back at the station, shouldn’t give him this much trouble. It shouldn’t bother him as much as it does either that it’s more of the former than the latter. It’s not sustainable. He was reminded of as much this morning at Duke’s mention that he’d be setting off again soon. Destination unknown. Return unknown. 

Telling Nathan these things has always seemed to be an afterthought for him.

 

 

 

And yet. 

Nathan drives back to the marina in the midst of a particularly aggressive downpour. Dispatch advises all patrol units to keep an eye out for downed trees, for power lines. Nathan switches off the radio. He’s off duty; that makes it someone else’s problem. He steers clear of the main streets too, skirting the edges of town instead.

The Cape Rouge is still docked in its usual spot when he arrives. 

It shouldn’t be as comforting as it is.

As surprising. 

Duke’s tidied up the place since this morning. The only things left on the deck are some old lobster traps, the bench he’s found Duke sitting out on in the mornings, feet kicked up on a shipping crate, and the clothesline he uses in the absence of a working dryer, or the space for one at any rate. He resolutely ignores the sight of his own shirt hanging there, clean and dry underneath the awning, mixed in with Duke’s clothes like there’s nothing abnormal about that. 

He’s still wearing that damn sweater. 

In the hour he was home, he could’ve changed. He also could’ve bothered to eat, although the state of his refrigerator is - questionable. Instead, he threw some clothes in a duffel bag to prevent a repeat of today - because while the Chief might be oblivious to his showing up in yesterday’s clothes he has a feeling Audrey Parker might not be - and the sharp citrus-spice scent wafting from the cabin beckons him further in.

Sure enough, Duke’s cooking. A pot of something red and fragrant simmers on the stove when he lets him in, taking his sweet time about doing it. Nathan thinks that’s punishment for earlier. In retrospect, accusing him of human trafficking only to jump to his defense at the insinuation he’d been involved in Jonas Lester’s murder a few hours later is fucked up even for them. For him, really. He’s known Duke a lot of years, knows him to be unreliable and not all that interested in legalities, but he doesn’t hurt people unless they hurt him first. Not physically, at least. 

He thinks about apologizing for that, rolls it around on his tongue but can’t force it past his teeth, and loses all will to try when he remembers this started because Duke’s leaving again. Old, familiar anger bubbles up to the surface. “Found your missing gun.” 

“Hello to you too,” Duke sighs, the door shutting heavily behind him. Nathan hears the brief moment of hesitation before he flips the locks, like he’s weighing Nathan’s tone against the bag he’s gripping, trying to assess the volatility of the situation. “I don’t suppose that means you’re here to give it back to me.” 

Nathan continues on, unabated. “You know where we found it?” 

“Well, I know there’s a ‘we’ and that’s never a good sign,” Duke quips, avoiding the question, avoiding being baited into revealing anything - if there’s even anything to reveal - and it only serves to piss him off further. He isn’t taking this seriously. He never takes anything seriously. 

Nathan narrows his eyes. “You think this is funny?” 

“I don’t even know what _this_ is yet, Nathan, so why don’t you enlighten me.” 

“Found it up on Tuwiuwok. Couple hundred feet from cliff’s edge.” He sees a quick burst of recognition in Duke’s expression, like he knows this story already. Gossip really does travel fast. “Have any run-ins with Jonas Lester lately?” 

Something unkind works its way into the curve of Duke’s mouth. “I hate to ruin the little story you’ve got going here, but you know _exactly_ where I was last night.” 

“I don’t think you killed him.” 

“Awesome,” Duke spits. 

“Don’t think it was a coincidence your gun showed up there either.” 

Duke shakes his head, pushing past him in a huff on his way to the stove. He fiddles with the controls with half his usual grace, clearly agitated and then some. “Look, you and I both know I didn’t kill him, and last I heard your dad’s pleased as punch he’s dead so does it really matter?” 

“The FBI’s digging around.” Judging by the look on Duke’s face, and the silent curse he sends skyward, that particular gossip hadn’t traveled yet. “Sent an agent out here this morning.” 

“Great, now I need an alibi for my alibi.”

“I told her.” 

Duke whirls on him. “You what?”

“I said I told her.” 

“I know, I heard you.” 

“Then wh - ” 

“You outed yourself to an FBI agent you just met _today_?” Duke says it like he’s waiting for the penny to drop, like he’d shake him if stepping that far into Nathan’s personal space wasn’t a gamble at this particular moment. Nathan doesn’t need the reminder. He knows. He knows, and it has been fine, it will be fine. Audrey Parker has bigger things on her mind than his extracurricular activities and, with any luck, it’ll stay that way. “And you thought I was the reckless one.” 

“I’m not the one whose gun showed up at a crime scene,” Nathan fires back, on instinct, but it’s going down the same path they’ve already been down. They both know he didn’t put it there. What he needs to know is who did. And Duke damn well knows that much, from how coy he was just playing. “There’s more contraband on this boat than there is in evidence lock-up back at the station, and I don’t ask about that - ”

“Actually - ”

Nathan gives him a hard look.

It stalls out the rest of Duke’s argument, which was never really an argument so much as yet another attempt at evasion. A half-assed one too. He watches Duke blow out a breath, shaking his head even as he starts talking. “He wanted me to run him up to Canada. Said he heard I was the guy to do it. I told him he was mistaken.”

“And then he took your gun?” 

“I guess.” 

“You _guess_.” 

“I was more concerned about getting him off my boat than I was with what he was doing while he was still on it,” Duke says, his hackles all the way up. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t make my living by smuggling ex-cons across the border. Or anyone else.” 

That again. Nathan should really apologize for that. He won’t but. He knows. Says as much too, with a not insignificant amount of trouble meeting Duke’s gaze. “I know you don’t.” 

Duke seems to read that as one anyways. He sighs, heavily, and maybe it’s the ringing in his ears he’s had since he slammed bodily into the asphalt a handful of hours ago but it sounds a lot like his name, sounds like _Nate_ without all the hostility it’d been couched in previously. 

It’s different. 

Fond. 

Nathan never knows what to do with that. With the whiplash. Fighting and fucking he can handle but it’s the little things in between, the extra cup of coffee left out to cool, the dull yellow night-light that appeared sometime after he lost the layout of the room in the dark and nearly broke his toe on the way to the bathroom, the quiet way Duke sometimes breathes his name. He doesn’t know what to do with any of that. It makes him hope for things that aren’t possible, that he isn’t stupid enough to even entertain.

Duke ends up inside his personal space after all. They’re not quite toe-to-toe but it’s a close thing, and that’s hardly new for them but Nathan inhales too sharply anyways when Duke reaches out, his fingers trailing along Nathan’s arm. Nathan has to watch to be sure but he doesn’t mind it; it’s an excuse not to have to look Duke in the eye. “Thought they wouldn’t let you into the station wearing this.” 

He means, of course, the sweater. Nathan tries for a joke, ignores how rough his voice sounds when he says, “Never actually made it in today.” 

Duke hums something that sounds faintly like approval and then he’s kissing him, no warning other than the hand that tilts his chin up, manifesting as a gentle jolt to his vision. The angle is still not the greatest, but he tastes white wine when he parts his lips enough for Duke to deepen the kiss, a burst of citrus beneath that, and it - it works well enough. Nathan’s got muscle memory on his side, he’s got the vaguest ghost of sensation with Duke’s tongue in his mouth, some combination of resistance and momentum working together to give him at least that much. 

Nathan’s looking for something a little harder tonight, something to give him that dopamine high he’s found himself chasing more and more, but he’s content enough to take it slow, least he is until Duke pulls back so he can strip Nathan of his borrowed sweater and, upon doing so, gets an eyeful of the white gauze wrapped around his arm, blooming red in the middle where he’s apparently bled through. There’s tiny specks of dried blood on the inside of the sleeve. Duke hisses through his teeth, a sharp whistling noise, and Nathan winces, not from the pain he can’t feel but from the reaction he knows is coming. 

“Shit.” Duke lets the sweater drop to the floor and makes a grab for his arm, only to pull back at the last second, unsure. Worried there’s more injuries hiding in plain sight, presumably. He’s not wrong, but Nathan isn’t telling him about the MRI he promised Eleanor he’d get and didn’t. 

Instead, he says, “It’s fine.” 

Duke presses the pads of his fingers against the bandage, cautiously, _gently_ if Nathan’s eyes don’t deceive him, and blood smears faintly against his skin. Which means he’s bleeding again. Great. “You need to re-wrap it.” Duke’s fingers move to the thin strips of medical tape holding the gauze in place, tugging gingerly before he adds, “Tighter.” 

“Not worried about it,” Nathan tells him, shaking off Duke’s hand and leaning in to pick up where they left off - only to be stopped with a palm flat against his chest. Nathan all but growls in frustration. “It’s road rash, it’s _fine_. I didn’t get shot.” 

“How the hell did you get road rash on your _arm_?”

“Played chicken with a truck.” 

“What?” 

Nathan sighs. “Can we just - ”

“You’re not getting blood all over my freshly washed sheets,” Duke tells him, before he can finish that thought. Nathan rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t argue while Duke bends to get the first aid kit he keeps under the bar - one of two, the other in the bathroom cabinet, possibly others elsewhere, stockpiled like all the guns that seem to be hiding everywhere. This one is surprisingly light on supplies. Nathan decides not to examine that too closely. 

He lets himself be maneuvered into a chair, watching passively while Duke cuts through the wrapping, his jaw tensing once he gets a good look at the wound. It doesn’t look that bad, if you ask Nathan, but he’s not in the mood to argue about the severity of it. That’ll just take longer. On his own, Duke moves fairly methodically. Like he’s done this a lot. He’s always been like that, even when they were kids and Duke was treating a scrape on the knee like the end of the world, mumbling about sepsis long before Nathan had any idea what that word meant much less how ridiculous it was in that context. 

“Any other surprises?” Duke asks, when he’s done, fingers still absentmindedly smoothing down the tape that’s once again holding the whole thing in place. The bandaging seems bulkier, thicker, like he’s worried about Nathan bleeding through it again. It’s gonna make getting dressed interesting. Nathan shakes his head, no, and doesn’t feel any sort of sting of guilt about lying to him. It’s an unnecessary hassle and this day has been long enough already. “We’ll change it in the morning.” 

“It’s fine.” 

“Shut up.”

There’s some heat to it, but the good kind, and Nathan eyes the pot simmering on the stove, licks his lips as he looks back at Duke, more for effect than anything else. “That gonna explode if you leave it alone for an hour?” 

Duke furrows his brow, mouth opening and closing a few times before he lands on, “You really don’t know much about cooking, do you?” 

He doesn’t know why he takes the bait. “I know that’s curry.” 

“Laksa, actually.” Duke corrects. “Ish.” 

“I really don’t care.” 

Duke tries to look put-out by that, but it loses a little something, what with the laughter and all. “You really think this is going to take an hour?” 

“That your way of saying you’re not up for it?” Nathan asks, leaning into every inch of that innuendo just because he can, just because he knows it’ll get a reaction. Duke shifts in his seat, letting out a sigh that turns into a groan halfway through. 

This time, when Duke tells him to shut up, he makes it stick.

 

 

Nathan awakens, some hours later, to the rustling of fabric, Duke cursing under his breath as he bends to retrieve - then immediately discards - a pair of jeans that evidently aren’t his, moving around in the dark with an ease Nathan can’t much identify with. 

He’s dimly aware of the rain tapping against the roof. For all the wood accenting Duke favors in his living space, it still sounds like they’re trapped in a tin can every time a storm passes through, and he must make a noise, a groan maybe, as he buries his face in the pillows, trying to block out the sound, because Duke starts talking to him. He gets the tail end of it, gets _think it’s hailing_ and then something about checking for leaks, and Nathan makes a valiant effort at responding but it mostly comes out as a muffled hum before he slips into unconsciousness again.

Then, the splash. 

It’s too close. He can hear the hail now, can hear the wind beating against the bulkheads, but that splash sticks out enough to force him out of bed, searching for his own clothes in a graceless fumble before he remembers the discarded jeans that must’ve been his own. He’s got one leg on when Duke starts shouting for him, too out of breath for nothing to be wrong, and Nathan doesn’t even have the time to process his relief that that shout means Duke is still on the boat and not at the bottom of the fucking ocean because the first thing he sees when he hits the deck is the limp body Duke’s got in his arms.

And that’s how Audrey Parker cheats death for the second time that day. 

 

 

Duke sends him off to change the sheets. 

Nathan doesn’t quite comprehend that order the first or second time it’s given to him. It seems like a ridiculous request, in light of Parker’s unconscious form laid across one of the stateroom benches, her skin tinged a bit bluer than it should be. Or maybe it’s the lighting. He blinks a few times, and by then Duke’s back with towels he’s produced from somewhere. Nathan doesn’t know where he keeps them, or the sheets, which makes that request even more nonsensical. He should be doing something more useful, like - 

“Nathan,” Duke says, like it’s probably not the first time, and Nathan draws his eyes away from the rise and fall of Parker’s chest, Duke’s fingers stilling on the third button of her blouse, the first two already undone - he’s not sure if that was Duke’s doing or the brief bout of CPR he missed whilst scrambling for his clothes, he assumes, because she was breathing when he got above deck, she’s breathing now - “Nathan,” Duke says, again, more urgent. He stares, blankly. “You work with her, right? Then you probably shouldn’t be around for this part.” 

Because he’s about to strip her down, Nathan realizes. It makes sense. Wet clothes won’t do her any good, not with how cold it is, how cold the water was. He should give her the dignity of - 

“Right,” he manages, finally. He heads off in the direction of the bedroom. He forgets to ask where the sheets are, but finds them anyways, hiding in a closet he didn’t even know existed. There’s so many cubbyholes and secret compartments scattered around that he thinks he could live here for years and still fail to find them all. 

Duke’s got her down to her underwear when he’s done, a decision he seems to rethink with a glance in Nathan’s direction. He slips one of his old button-downs over her arms as a last minute concession to modesty, content to let it swallow her smaller frame up rather than mess with the buttons. His hands shake a little, Nathan notices. He’s not immune to the cold either, but he gets her back up and into his bed without effort, pulling the blankets up to her chin, forcing her arms under along with the rest of her. She fights him a little on that, the first signs of life he’s seen so far, but gives up relatively easily when faced with the prospect of much needed warmth. 

It’s strange, seeing her like that. The limited time he’s known her for has left it hard to picture her as anything other than constantly in motion.

“You good?” Duke asks, suddenly next to him, his fingers curling around air, waiting to have Nathan’s attention on him before he wraps them around his arm. He’s good about that part. About making sure Nathan knows what he’s doing. Nathan can’t feel it, but he still has to force himself not to lean in, like if he just presses close enough then maybe, maybe he can - 

Nathan swallows. “I’m fine.” 

 

 

Duke makes coffee and mops up the floor, quizzing him on why Parker might be hanging around the docks at this hour, about what Nathan might’ve told her, about if he should be worried about the FBI agent lying unconscious in his bed. He pitches his voice low, wary of waking her considering their close proximity, and it’s late enough that Nathan doesn’t feel much like fighting so he answers more than he doesn’t. Monosyllabically, in some cases, but it seems to calm his rattled nerves anyways, for all Duke’s usually better at hiding them.

“She’s here for Lester,” Nathan reminds him, with a sigh that’s less exasperated than he intended it to be. “Just don’t give her a tour of the cargo hold and you’ll be fine. She’s not interested in turning this into a turf war. Chief already tried that one.” 

Duke snorts. 

“What?” 

“Nothing.” There’s a tone there, though, that promises otherwise, and Nathan can guess where this is going because Duke and the Chief have had an almost pathological distrust of each other from the day they met. Nathan’s yet to decide whether that’s a feature or a bug. “I’m just kinda surprised he didn’t roll the red carpet out for her right on my doorstep. Also, kind of insulted.”

Nathan rolls his eyes. “He doesn’t care.”

“Yeah? Cared enough to toss me in a cell as soon as you left town.”

“You had an eighth on you,” Nathan says, automatically, facts first and feelings never, which is really the wrong way to go about it when he still remembers the way Duke refused to go in the house with him when he came back for winter break freshmen year and the shouting match he had with the Chief afterwards, slamming his way out of the house ten minutes in. The way Duke looks at him now sort of screams betrayal and he wasn’t really aiming for that. “That was seventeen years ago. He got over it.”

“Can’t imagine why that is.” 

“Don’t.” 

Duke braces his hands against the counter, leaning back. Challenging Nathan to tell him he’s wrong when he says, “Bet he’d care if he knew I was fucking his son.” 

His words hang heavy in the air, and that had been what he’d been worried about earlier, hadn’t it? Not whether Parker knew, but whether it’d get back to the Chief, whether on accident or on purpose. _Your father must love that_ , she’d said. Like she knew better without having to be told. “He doesn’t.” 

“Yet.” 

“I trust her,” Nathan says. 

“Not to put too fine of a point on it, Nathan, but you used to trust me too.” Duke smiles, something almost wistful, sad. “And look how that turned out.” 

It turned out with Duke halfway around the world. It turned out with Nathan spending half his time wondering whether he was alive or dead, wondering which one he prefered. Wondering if it had been Duke’s choice to leave at all. Whether it was something that he’d caused, or that someone else had, because it couldn’t have been Duke’s doing, Duke wouldn’t have just - 

“I trust you,” Nathan says. It feels like an opening he’s not meant to leave alone, feels like he’ll regret it if he lets it slide. Duke looks at him like he doesn’t believe a word of it, but underneath that there’s surprise - at the effort, maybe - and it makes him wish he knew how to explain that it’s not a lie, not exactly. More of an oversimplification. He can trust Duke with his unfeeling body but he can’t trust him to stay, can’t trust him not to turn around and use whatever little pieces of himself Nathan gives him as ammo against him. He’s done it before. He might do it again. 

“It’s fine,” Duke says, waving him off. “I wasn’t trying to - ” he lets the rest of his sentence trail away, leaving Nathan to fill in the blanks for himself. Bait, he thinks. He wasn’t trying to bait him. Duke’s not much for having to drag things out of him. Seems to have determined that if he does, any answer he’s getting is the placating one. Whether that’s true or not. “Don’t worry about it.” 

He does. He shouldn’t, considering - a lot of things, that little voice in his head telling him the safe bet here is to leave before he can be left especially, but he does. “I’m not.” 

Duke nods, tells the toes of his boots, “Good.” 

 

 

It’s morning when he blinks awake.

Dawn, or thereabouts, the light from the portholes sending scatters of gold against the far side of the cabin. Duke’s out of sight but Nathan trusts he’s still on the boat somewhere, the warm, familiar smell of coffee lingering beneath the sharp, oily one emanating from the bottle of WD-40 Duke’s left behind on the table across from him, an old rag partially soaked in it balled up at its side. Remnants of Duke’s attempt at doing something about Parker’s waterlogged gun. That’s missing now, although he doesn’t have to look far to locate it, the clearing of a throat from his left leading him to - 

Parker. 

Clad in the shirt Duke had buttoned her into last night. Gun drawn, though lowered. Not happy. 

Nathan fumbles his first attempt at pushing himself into a sitting position, unused to falling asleep on the narrow benches Duke uses as dining room furniture, hands not finding purchase where he expects them to and instead getting tangled up in the blanket Duke must’ve thrown over him while he was out. 

The second try goes much better. “What are you doing?”

“What am I - what am _I_ doing?” Parker asks, eyebrows on the rise. There’s an edginess to her tone. Annoyance, not fear. Nathan supposes that’s valid. “Waking up on a stranger’s boat. Without my clothes. Where are my clothes, Nathan?” 

“Think Duke washed them,” he says, rubbing at his bleary eyes and trying not to let that impede his efforts at sounding like he has any clue what’s gone on around him in the last - he turns his wrist to check his watch - three hours. It sounds like a Duke thing to do. Duke cooks and cleans and does loads of laundry at two in the morning like some hyperactive domestic housewife. Or househusband, as the case may be. Not that Duke could ever be anyone’s husband. Not that he has the capacity for that kind of loyalty. 

Parker is laughing at him, silently.

“What?”

“Duke, huh?” 

“He’s - “

“I remember,” she assures, eyes full of mirth. “Just - when I saw your truck parked here I thought you were following up on a lead without me, not playing house.” 

Nathan grimaces. “Trust me, I’m not.”

“Wait.” 

He recognizes her tone. 

It’s roughly the same one she used to discuss the pedophile population of Santa Barbara with Marion Caldwell. Nathan struggles to communicate with people properly on a semi-daily basis but Parker has this whole tact-free raised by wolves thing going on sometimes that just - 

“If you can’t feel, how do you - you know.” 

“Parker!” 

“What? It’s valid.” 

Nathan lets himself collapse back against the bench. He can’t feel his face flush but he doesn’t need a mirror to figure out that it’s probably run the full spectrum of pink to red. He covers his face with his hands, passing it off as exasperation, and murmurs something about professionalism or lack thereof. 

“Hey, I’m standing here in - ” she pauses, thoughtfully, “ - your boyfriend’s shirt. And, judging by the absence of my clothes, one of you partially undressed me last night. I’d say professionalism went out the window a while ago.” 

She has a point. 

“Not my boyfriend,” he insists. 

Parker ignores him. “Who was it, anyway?” 

Cautiously, Nathan sits back up again. “Who was what?” 

“That, you know - ”

“Undressed you?” 

“Yeah.” 

He doesn’t think this line of conversation is doing wonders to bring his color down. “Duke, uh - he was the one that - ” 

Parker holds up a hand, saving him from himself. “I got it.” 

He lets out a breath of relief. 

“I’m guessing he was the one who fished me out too?” She sounds more embarrassed about that than about being stripped down by a stranger. That she had to be saved. Again. She’s having a bad run of luck, this past day. They have that in common, and Nathan nods his confirmation. “Right. Pretty great insurance policy for someone who probably doesn’t want the FBI digging around in his life.”

“He didn’t know who you were,” Nathan says, instinctively on the defensive, for all that that’s a weird sensation for him.

“Well, I didn’t think he stopped to check for ID before he pulled me out of the water.” Nathan ducks his head. Of course Duke wouldn’t have known. Not like he showed up tonight armed with a headshot so Duke would know who to steer clear of. “Did you find out how Lester ended up with his gun?” 

“He was looking for a ride up to Canada,” he tells her. “Duke waved him off.” 

“And took a souvenir for his trouble.”

“Looks like.” 

She considers this. “You think that’s the whole story?” 

Nathan’s reasonably sure he hasn’t had the full story about anything in the three years since Duke’s been back. He shrugs, resigned to it, in light of all the pushing he’d done last night. “Story he told me.”

That’s not quite good enough for Parker. He’d thought as much. She blows out a breath, dissatisfied, and then squares her shoulders, the hem of her borrowed shirt creeping up her bare thighs. Nathan finds somewhere else to look. At least until he hears her thumb the safety off her gun.

“Don’t think you’re gonna need that,” he says, tone even. He sits up a little straighter though, trying to figure out if this is a situation he needs to intervene in or not. Duke’s a pain in the ass sometimes but Nathan isn’t a fan of the idea of her getting her answers at gunpoint. Especially not after all but promising Duke that she wasn’t here for him.

“Relax.” She reads right through his posture. Her trigger finger taps the barrel of her sidearm, as if to say she has no intentions of shooting anyone, at least not this morning, and he does as she says. For a given meaning of relaxing. “Can’t hurt to scare him a little, right?” 

“You know how many guns he keeps stashed on this boat?” 

“There’s a 9mm stashed under the mattress,” she says, thinking on it a moment longer before adding, “Also a twelve gauge in his closet. Really shouldn’t have left that open if he didn’t wanna advertise. I don’t think he wants to go down for assault on a federal agent though.” 

Nathan smiles, wryly. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then we’ll be fine.” 

She’s gone, then, a swish of blonde hair and bare feet turning down the hall, instinctively knowing where to go without having to ask. Waving a gun around like she owns the place. In motion. 

 

 

He finds them, later. 

Parker’s perched on one of the old weathered wooden crates, cradling a coffee cup with both hands, having forgone one of the dozen-odd garishly patterned lawn chairs Duke always seems to have on hand. It gives her a few extra inches of height over Duke, sprawled out on his usual bench with his feet kicked up and crossed at the ankles, seemingly unbothered. Nathan knows better than to take that at face value, but Parker’s gun is holstered now and they’re both still in one piece which is an improvement on any scenario his own mind could dredge up in the fifteen minutes it took him to shower and dress. 

Duke’s on his feet though, the second he catches sight of him, muttering “dammit, Nathan” with his eyes locked on the bulge of bandages underneath Nathan’s sleeve. Nathan holds out a hand, shakes his head. Not here. Parker might know more than anyone else in this town but they don’t need to advertise it regardless and he watches that sink in, watches Duke slink back down in his seat, still staring like if he tries hard enough he can see underneath the fabric, check if he did the dressings right. 

“Wow,” Parker observes, over the rim of her cup. “That was - not subtle.”

Duke breaks off with a smile, embarrassment tangling with amusement, and reaches for the coffee he’s set aside, a third cup that’s only barely still steaming. Black, something earthier than he gets at the station or Joe’s. Nathan nods his thanks, then gulps down a third of it, eager for the caffeine high to hit. He has a feeling he’ll need it. “Nice to see you didn’t kill each other.”

“Hey, she was the only one packing,” Duke says. “My gun was stolen, remember?”

Parker arches an eyebrow at him. “Uh huh.” 

Nathan snorts. 

They’re getting along well. 

“I called into the station,” she tells him, holding up a heavily-embellished pink cell phone that nearly makes Nathan choke on his coffee. Off his reaction, she rolls her eyes. “His fault. Mine’s dead.” Duke, who Nathan knows has at least half a dozen unused burner phones tucked away, most of them plain black and lacking in faux gemstones, smirks. “Anyways, the forensics lab managed to reconstruct the paper we found on Lester’s body. Stu said it looked like some kinda tide calendar, so naturally - ”

Ignoring the dull roar in his ears that comes with the knowledge that Duke has managed to pull one over on him and leave something out again, Nathan instead chooses to ask, “Stu?” 

“Yeah.” 

“We don’t have a Stu.” 

“What?” 

_Stan_ , Duke mouths. 

“Stan?” Nathan asks. 

“Who?” 

“This is a charming game of who’s on first,” Duke mutters.

“Shut up,” they both tell him, in unison. 

Duke just laughs. 

“Hey,” Parker barks, “who’s the one who left out that they supplied Lester with a registration number so that he could smuggle himself to Canada?” That shuts him up. Nathan gives him a long, tired glare, unsurprised but annoyed nonetheless. “One of us should check it out.” 

“You want Conrad?” he asks. 

She gives him a significant look. 

“Alright. I’ll go talk to the harbormaster.”

“Actually - ” Duke cuts him off, already out of his seat. His hand finds Nathan’s good arm, tugs hard enough for him to notice. He loses his footing momentarily, balance already a precarious thing for him, but Duke’s grip turns more push than pull and it passes. “I need to borrow you.” 

“Duke, I don’t - ”

“Nate.” 

His tone says he’s not asking. Nathan shoots Parker an apologetic look, rather than try ripping his arm away. She looks more amused than put out, but her eyes drift to a stack of crates tucked away under the awning like it occurs to her that those probably aren’t as empty as the ones she was just sitting on. 

Leaving her for long is probably a dangerous proposition. He intends to remind Duke of as much, but that’s before he ends up backed against a wall just inside the door. It closes behind them with a sharp thud that tells him Duke elected to kick it closed. Probably for drama’s sake. 

Nathan says. “Is this necessary?” 

“Fuck yeah, it is.” Duke’s standing close enough that his breath hits Nathan full in the face. He shoves at the hem of Nathan’s shirt, and Nathan lets him, lifting his arms to oblige him. Duke doesn’t trust his first aid skills and giving in will get this over with quicker than fighting him will. “You said it was road rash. You didn’t say anything about a fracture. Shit, Nathan.” 

He stares back at Duke, watching his face rather than his hands. “Do you really think now’s the time to lecture me on lies of omission?”

“Hey,” Duke’s voice travels, briefly, while he ventures further into the cabin, returning with a roll of surgical tape. Nathan spares a glance at the dressing; the edge has come undone and Nathan rolls his eyes at this whole ordeal. It’s road rash. It doesn’t fucking matter. “If I hadn’t given him information, someone else would’ve.”

“Not my problem.”

“Yeah? You hit your head hard enough to forget you’re a cop?” His question is punctuated by the tape tearing. Duke’s using his fingers, not the scissors this time, and he’s taking care to skirt around the injury he can’t see, looking like he’s wary of others. So much for Parker keeping her mouth shut. That doesn’t quite bode well in other respects. “You should get it looked at. You put weight on that arm last night.”

“I already had it looked at - ” 

“In a hospital,” Duke chides. “Not the back of an ambulance.” 

Nathan knocks his head back against the wall. “Are we done yet?” 

Duke huffs, but he drops the tape a moment later. Nathan hears more than sees him smooth a hand over the bandages, newly secured. “Yeah, fine, you’re done.” Nathan makes to move off the wall, with Duke’s hands no longer pressing him into it, but there’s a mumbled _fuck, wait_ and then Duke’s mouth is on his, tasting like the same strong coffee he knows is on his own tongue. Nathan lets himself sink into it. It’s bad timing and Parker will probably be all the more nosy for it, but it feels - well. It feels. He gets something from this. He’s not sure when it stopped being a defiant act in the face of his numbness, but something about the resistance he meets from the hand pressed into the center of his chest, the way Duke groans into his mouth when Nathan nips at his bottom lip a little too hard - it’s always too hard, he knows, hasn’t quite figured out how to reliably gauge pressure - makes his brain light up with a pleasant sort of buzz. 

“Hospital,” Duke says, when he breaks off. He releases Nathan though, steps away and rubs a hand along the back of his neck. Nerves. Duke thinks he doesn’t have tells, talks big game about his poker skills because of it, but Nathan’s known him long enough to know he’s full of shit. 

“Murder investigation,” Nathan shoots back, anyway. 

Duke shakes his head. “You know one day, when you can feel again, you’re gonna wish you actually listened to me.” 

Nathan snorts. Yeah. _Right_.

That’ll be the day.

 

 

“So, that’s Duke, huh?” 

Nathan fixes her with a look that begs her not to continue. 

“He’s cute,” Parker says, unperturbed. “Not what I figured for your type, but - ”

“Yeah?” he asks, taking the bait even though he knows it’s bait. Better to just embrace it then let her try to turn him into a flustered mess again. “What’s my type, then?” 

“I don’t know,” she says, “someone not gunning for a role in the next Pirates of the Caribbean. All he needs is some eyeliner, maybe a ponytail.” 

He keeps his expression carefully blank. The lack of reaction almost seems to disturb her. 

“It’s a movie. You do know what those are, right?”

Nathan shrugs. “I don’t own a TV.” 

“Of course you don’t.” She palms her keys, the distant click of the locks disengaging alerting him to the new rental car she’s acquired. It’s tan, unassuming; it’s also parked three spaces down from his truck. She knew he was here. “Hey, is this some haze the city girl thing? Just a one red light town with no movie theater, nothing weird happening here at all except for the fugitive that magically catapulted off a cliff and, oh, also the sudden wall of fog that come out of nowhere.” 

“There’s a movie theater,” he deadpans.

“You know,” she says, “at least when Duke bullshitted me, he made me coffee. You could learn a thing or two from him.” 

Nathan smirks. “That mean he’s off your suspect list?” 

“For now.” She glances up at him, gauging his reaction before adding, “Why? Worried a bunch of feds are gonna drag your boyfriend off on smuggling charges?” 

“No,” he says, with a smirk. “Hopeful.”

 

 

Nathan does make that hospital visit. 

Probably not in the way Duke meant him to, but an MRI is an MRI. The seven stitches he ends up with for the through-and-through gunshot wound to his right shoulder however -

“I’m like a bad luck charm for you,” Parker says, peering at the fresh sutures without even a hint of squeamishness. “Yesterday, I gave you a busted finger and a fractured shoulder. Today, you somehow managed to get shot in the same shoulder. Maybe tomorrow you should just stay home.” 

“Chief already stopped by to tell me I’m on desk duty for the rest of the week,” he grumbles. That had been _all_ the Chief had said too, aside from a gruff remark that at least it missed the artery. No _glad you’re alive_ , no _do you need anything?_ ; that would be too expressive. Desk duty feels more like a punishment for getting shot than it does any sort of relief. “And I’m not the one who almost died. Twice.”

She scoffs, swatting him in his good arm. “Nine lives.”

“Isn’t that for cats?” 

“Cats and stubborn FBI agents.” Parker sips on her coffee thoughtfully. It’s the cheap watered-down hospital crap he makes a point of avoiding but she doesn’t seem concerned with the taste. “They say when they’re letting you out?” 

“About an hour or two.” He eyes the sling next to him. “Any chance you’re sticking around ‘til then? Doc won’t clear me to drive home in that thing.” 

“Some of us still have actual work to do,” she says, but she’s smiling when she does, ribbing him. He’s unsurprised to find he’s going to miss her when she’s gone. “But yeah, I’ll swing by. It’ll be a nice break from paperwork and your dad looking at me like I’m an escaped mental patient.” 

“Wouldn’t take it personally,” he tells her. 

Her mouth twists. “Not the biggest fan of outsiders?”

“You could say that.” 

“Yeah, I’m getting that.” She comes to lean against the gurney they have him sitting on, close enough that her bent elbow almost barely brushes his knee when she breathes. Or maybe it does. He can’t tell without the sensation of it, no matter how much he squints. “But it’s not just him, is it? It’s everyone here. Conrad, Marion - even you.” Parker glances at him sideways and something like guilt winds its way through him. “Hell, Duke tried to tell me this weather was normal for Haven. I’m pretty sure the only people who didn’t try to give me the runaround were those guys from the newspaper and even there something felt - off.”

The Teagues. Of course the two worst gossips the town has to offer would’ve smelt fresh blood and rushed over. “I think they have that effect on most people.” 

“They showed me an old article, about the Hastings family. Moved here from Georgia after a series of freak storms that destroyed their hometown in the fifties. Marion’s mother was one of them.” She taps her fingers against her mostly-drained coffee cup; the sound is hollow now. “That doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me, and I don’t think they thought so either but you - you acted like I’d lost my mind when I said that Conrad, or Marion I guess, blew me down the street. But you didn’t seem surprised at all when it was happening right in front of you.” 

She’s a little too quick on the uptake. He’ll give her that. It’ll make editing out all the references to Marion’s - powers in Parker’s incident report that much more fun. “You think I’m lying to you?” 

“I think you know more than you’re saying,” she replies. 

“Yeah, well.” He thinks about the crack in the road that mirrors the hastily caulked crack in Duke’s bathroom ceiling, thinks about the bullet wound he's sporting and how the doctor tried to offer him painkillers before she remembered who she was talking to. Marion Caldwell is just a drop in the pot. “Welcome to Haven.” 

 

 

He calls Parker to pick him up a little after six. 

She makes general noises of agreement, swears she heard him when he needles her about it, but he can hear the sounds of her typing all the while. So he’s not exactly expecting to see her rental parked in the lot at six-thirty, the street lights illuminated even though the sun hasn’t quite set yet. What he doesn’t expect to see is his own truck parked in the pick-up zone. 

Nathan gets in anyways. 

“I called Parker.” 

“Audrey’s busy.” Duke drums his fingers against the steering wheel and makes a series of not so subtle glances in his direction, specifically in the direction of his bandaged shoulder. Nathan tries very hard not to let loose the low, strangled noise he wants to give at the idea of yet another lecture on all the ways he should be taking better care of himself. “Sorry to disappoint.”

He doesn’t dignify that with a response. 

Duke starts the engine.

“I can actually drive, you know,” Nathan mutters. 

“Yeah, you can, but there’s this thing I seem to remember from driver’s ed. Something about ten and two?” Because he’s a dramatic asshole, Duke mimics the hand placement in the most overexaggerated way possible. Nathan wonders if anyone would care if he threw Duke out of his truck right now.

Instead, he says, “I’ve seen you drive with your knees.” 

Duke makes what passes for a hurt face - though doesn’t fool Nathan - and then tells him, very, very seriously, “I’m a criminal, Nathan.” 

Nathan rolls his eyes. “Don’t I know it.” 

“So - ” Duke glances over, “your place or mine?” 

It’s not even really a choice, when his house is still a mess of unopened mail and laundry he’s put off, but it feels like one. Stay or go. Continue giving someone the chance to hurt you, again, or get out ahead of it. It’s not that serious but it is _always_ that serious with them and yesterday Nathan had thought maybe he was finally over this, maybe it was finally out of his system -

He sighs. 

He thought wrong. 

“Yours.” 

 

 

tbc.


	2. butterfly

Duke leaves on a Wednesday afternoon.

“I’ll be back in a few days,” Duke tells him, in the morning, words muffled by the toothbrush hanging out of his mouth. His fingers move down the row of buttons on Nathan’s shirt with ease, a habit he’d picked up after months of watching Nathan struggle with it. He doesn’t offer help so much as give it, and Nathan does his best to stay still and not grumble too much. “Tuesday, at the latest.” 

He puts his whole hand to Nathan’s chest when he’s done, heart-center, as if to say he’s good to go. There’s a spot of foam on his top lip. Nathan tries not to let the creeping sense of anxiety that’s been tying him into knots since last night show in his eyes, and after a moment Duke turns away, spits into the sink. Goes back to brushing, this time humming around it. 

Nathan leaves before he’s out of the bathroom, tossing a _see you_ his way from the door, the _later_ part never quite forcing its way out. There’s no response. The radio above the galley sink is playing something vaguely reminiscent of high school, low but maybe not low enough to not swallow his words. He lets the heavy door shut behind him anyways. 

It’s a weird last image to have, he thinks later. 

 

 

Days pass. 

He gets out of his own bed three days in a row. The distance from the mattress to the floor is different at home than it is on the Rouge. He misjudges it the first morning, bleary-eyed, and almost twists his ankle trying to catch himself. The next two go better. It doesn’t stop feeling weird to be able to throw his arms out to the side in the middle of the night and not meet resistance in the form of Duke’s back, a hard wall of lean muscle he can sense even if he can’t exactly _feel_ it. 

The pile of mail gets smaller. Bills get paid. The smoke detector stops crying out for attention. He buys cans of soup and boxes of takeout, heats up the former for too long and doesn’t notice he’s burnt his tongue til the taste of his coffee seems off the next morning. He trades in his button-downs for t-shirts and tapes a thermometer to his front door. 

It’s back to normal, the way things were before Duke, the way he managed for a decade on his own, before Duke came sailing back into his life. The way he manages in the spaces where Duke takes off, bound for places unknown. It’s fine. 

It’s less, but it’s fine.

 

 

Audrey Parker turns up on Saturday. 

It’s lunch time. Half the station is out. She’s got a manila folder in one hand and a coffee in the other, hip cocked against the doorframe, already more interesting than any of the paperwork he’s got left to do. 

“Thought it was case closed,” he says. He means _thought you were gone_. He hasn’t seen her since that afternoon in the hospital, when she pawned him off on Duke. When he’d come to work the next day, there’d been a copy of her report on his desk - a post-it note attached with her cell number, a new one now rather than the burner Duke had given her, and the words _have fun_ which was either a reference to the report or to the night before, he wasn’t sure - but no sign of her. 

“Trying to get rid of me, Detective?” she asks, coyly.

He smirks. “Trying to avoid injury.” 

Parker’s eyes flick to his arm, no longer cradled in its sling. He’d gotten tired of having his movement impeded for nothing a few days into having it, and Duke had spent the rest of the week arguing with him every time he saw him lift anything heavier than his car keys. She smiles, faintly, and then steps inside, closing the door behind her. It piques his interest even more. 

“Have something for me?” he asks.

“Sort of.” She fiddles with the file folder in her hands, not quite nervous but - hesitant. Figuring out he was bullshitting her just like everyone else had apparently done little to build trust between them. She was still here, though, having closed-door meetings with him instead of back in Boston. “You grew up here, right?”

She already knows the answer. “Born and raised.” 

Parker nods a little, then slips a newspaper print-out from the folder, holding it out to him. “What do you know about the Colorado Kid murder?” 

He knows the picture that’ll be on the front before he sees it. He’d seen it a million times growing up, the afterimage of it imprinted on the backs of his eyelids if he closes his eyes and thinks about it hard enough, but something new stands out this time: the dark-haired echo of the woman in front of him. Nathan swallows, tries not to be obvious in letting his eyes dart between her and the photo. 

She sighs, anyway. “Yeah. I know.” 

“You know who she is?” he asks. 

“I was hoping you might,” she tells him. There’s not much hope backing the sentiment. She snags the chair that sits across from the extra desk in his office, metal legs scraping against the floor before she collapses into it. She’s been sitting on this awhile then, on her own. Probably for lack of other options. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. “I don’t remember her.”

Her face doesn’t fall but the corners of her mouth drop. Resignation. He thinks about her up on the bluffs; _I’m a free agent_ , she’d said, like that took the sting out of the word _orphan_. The woman in the photo could be someone to her, judging by the resemblance. And she’s someone who doesn’t have anyone left to her at all. 

When Parker reaches for the print-out, he plays keepaway. “The Chief was a beat cop on this case. He never solved it but, if you’re looking for a place to start, figure he’s as good as any.” 

“The Chief, huh?” She grimaces. It’s a reaction he’s well acquainted with. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled when he finds out I’m still in town.”

Nathan shrugs. “You’re a federal agent. Don’t think it matters much how he feels about it.” 

“That would be true,” she says, drawing the words out. “If I were here on official business. Which I’m not. Technically, this is pretty much my vacation time.” 

“Hell of a vacation.” 

“I never was very good at them,” she admits and, given that her work ethic had her wandering the docks after midnight a week ago, he doesn’t doubt that. Not that he’s one to talk. Her smile fades a little around the edges, turning wistful. “We never really had them when I was - ” she chews her lip, electing to bypass whatever lies beyond that, “and then when I got this job, it was like I was never home anyways. Spending more than two weeks in one place, now that would be a vacation.” 

“That what you’re doing here?” he asks. 

“Depends.” 

Nathan’s only been out of Maine a handful of times, short jaunts up to Canada in his early twenties, and he’s never been anything close to an orphan, but his mother died too fast and too young, lost somewhere in the blurry year that followed where the numbness he felt was a little less metaphorical, and his father - is the Chief, and probably will always be, for him. He knows what it’s like to feel that void. To crave that connection. 

And for her it’s worse, for never having had it in the first place. 

“You’re sure there’s no one else in the photo you recognize? Someone a little less inclined to give me the runaround for their own entertainment?” 

He lets his gaze settle on the more familiar sight in that photo. Eight year old Duke, with his oversized jacket and his slightly unfortunate haircut, clutching the hand of the mystery woman that could easily be Parker’s twin. And then he shakes his head, “I’m sure.” 

 

 

Nathan doesn’t know why he does it. 

It’s one of those moments again, one of those _what kind of cop are you going to be_ moments and if this were a test - morality or otherwise - he’d probably fail it because he’s the kind of cop that hears that note of longing in Parker’s voice and still keeps his mouth shut. He’s the kind of cop that would’ve let Jonas Lester’s death be classed as purely accidental without further inquiry and he’s the kind of cop that regularly spends his nights on a boat that could double as an armory or warehouse of stolen and illegal goods, depending on the week.

He’s nothing like he thought he’d turn out to be. 

 

 

 

He stays late on Monday.

It beats being at home, sorting through a week’s worth of laundry he’s yet to touch, and there’s been this weird undercurrent of anticipation running through him ever since he woke up. It’s less Christmas morning and more the night before a final exam. If he could feel his stomach, he’s pretty sure it’d be churning. He gets food from Joe’s and eats at his desk, forgetting about his sandwich halfway through it, and the sun is down by the time he even notices. 

The Chief has his coat in one hand when he sticks his head into his office. Even in the summer, it’s still chilly in the mornings. His new thermometer told him as much. “Haven’t seen you around this late in a while.” 

Nathan barely looks up from his paperwork. “Busy day.” 

It hasn’t been. He’s had approximately one call-out all day and that was mostly a case of particularly vicious haggling at the local antique store. His formerly growing backlog of paperwork has shrunk to barely enough to keep him occupied. If it were any other week, he’d have called it quits at five. But it isn’t.

So of course tonight is the night his father tries to bond. 

“All that’ll still be here tomorrow,” the Chief says. “Come on, come get some dinner with your old man. Give us a chance to talk.” 

Them. Talking. In a manner that doesn’t end in an argument. Now there’s a humorous concept if he’s ever heard one. “Already ate,” he says, nodding to the remains of his dinner. Duke would kill him if he knew that was most of what he’d had today, besides six cups of coffee and one of Rosemary’s cherry danishes. The Chief simply shakes his head. “I’m fine. You go ahead.” 

He doesn’t go anywhere. “Heard Duke Crocker’s boat’s outta harbor.”

Nathan blinks. “And?”

“Thought maybe you knew something about that.” 

He narrows his eyes. “What Duke does hasn’t been my business for a long time.” 

The Chief gives him an appraising look, akin to being hooked up to a lie detector. It doesn’t faze him. Nathan has been lying to his father’s face about Duke since he was eight years old. Whatever it is he’s after, he’s going to have to get it somewhere else. Nathan can tell when that hits home by the set of the Chief’s jaw. “Alright, then. You have a good night, Nathan.” 

Nathan watches him leave in silence.

And then he goes back to work.

 

 

He goes home in the wee hours of the morning.

Tosses his clothes in the wash without bothering to sort by color and passes out for a solid three hours before it’s time to go again. He lets the dryer run while he’s in the shower, watching his skin turn from pink to red under the spray, wondering how much time it would take to blister. He’d done it before, on accident, a few times when he first lost sensation, unhappy at the prospect of someone else testing it for him beforehand - 

( - and it would’ve been the Chief, who made a point of showing up every day those first few weeks, who had to remind him how to walk again, how to be able to close his eyes without crumpling to the floor from the loss of sensory input, how to chew again without mangling his own tongue, because it was him last time when Nathan was seven and a whole lot more helpless so of course it had to be him again, because there was no one else who could - )

The first time he showered on the Rouge he’d emerged from the bathroom cherry red and fighting to hide his humiliation. Two days later, there were fan-shaped pieces of tape above the faucet handles, colored in red and blue, denoting where the safe zones were. He didn’t scald himself again and Duke never said a word about any of it. 

When the dryer finishes, he tosses a fresh change of clothes into his duffel and stows it in the back of his truck before he leaves for work.

Just in case.

 

 

The sculpture that usually resides outside the Good Shepherd Church turns into a literal wrecking ball and crashes through the side of the Rust Bucket mid-morning.

“So last week it was murder and this week it’s - property damage?” Parker asks, riding shotgun on the Chief’s recommendation. They’d stopped for coffee - good coffee, not station coffee - before heading over and her fingers are stained purple from the blueberry muffin she’s tearing at. “That’s quite the downgrade.” 

“Should’ve gone to the moose farm,” he tells her. She scoffs. Loudly. There’s maybe even a muttered _please_ under her breath. “Could be fun. Really get the full Haven experience.”

Parker laughs. “And here I thought the full Haven experience was almost dying several times and then having the whole town conspire against you.” 

“They weren’t conspiring.” 

“We,” she corrects. 

“ _We_ weren’t conspiring.” 

“Do you like ‘lying’ better?” 

Nathan stares blankly out at the crosswalk they’re stopped at. “In the summer, they churn their own ice cream using moose milk.”

“Ok, now I know you’re lying.” 

“Am I?” 

Parker wrinkles her nose. It doesn’t look like she wants an answer to that. “Is that really what people do for fun around here? Date night at the moose farm?” 

“Wouldn’t know.” 

“Because you’re anti-fun?”

He squirms. There’s really no other word for it. “Don’t date much.” 

“Oh.” She pops the remains of her muffin into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “Guess that’s part of the whole secret relationship thing.”

“It’s not a relationship.” 

“There were two toothbrushes in the bathroom,” she says. “That’s a relationship. Is this because he won’t go to the moose museum with you? Because I could call him up - ”

Parker’s already making moves towards his phone, eyes full of mirth. He hates to burst her bubble, but the bitterness surging up in him won’t let him keep quiet. “Don’t think cell phones get reception that far out at sea.” 

She stops mid-pursuit. “He left?” Nathan nods. “Temporarily or…?” He shrugs, keeping his eyes on the road. He’ll be on the fence about it ‘til he sees the Rouge in harbor. “Any idea why?” 

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?” 

“We don’t really - talk about that.” 

“So it’s illegal,” she surmises. 

“Which is _why_ we don’t talk about it.” 

“And you’re not curious at all?”

Clearly he was right to think twice about leaving her alone for any length of time on the boat. “Most of what he runs is goods. Not people. I don’t even think he knows what half of it is.” 

She snorts. “Because that’s better.” 

“I’ve known him since he was five,” he tells her, wanting badly to put this topic to bed. Or at least the part where he’s forced to analyze all the things Duke could be doing that he’s willfully overlooking for his own selfish reasons. “I know what he’s capable of.” 

“If you say so,” she says. Then, doubling back around, “Five, though? And you two still haven’t figured shit out?” 

“There was a ten year break.” 

“What the hell did you do for the other twenty years?” 

“Oh, look, we’re here.” 

 

 

“We can just wait outside.”

Parker looks at him like he’s lost his mind. “No.”

He watches the slow procession of people headed into the church - for a Tuesday afternoon baptism, evidently - with growing trepidation. He wants to go in there less than he wanted to go get that late dinner the Chief had suggested last night. And that’s a hell of a bar.

“Not religious?” she asks. 

“No,” he says, even if that’s not why he can’t seem to pry his feet off the pavement. 

Not that he really has a choice. They’ve already been to see Otis, working through the remains of his decimated bar, and the church groundskeeper. Neither had any real answers about how that big metal ball had gotten free and made a beeline for The Rust Bucket beyond conjecture. Which leaves the Rev as the last person on their very short list of people to talk to and Nathan already knows exactly how well that conversation is going to go. 

“Neither am I,” she offers. She’s stopped frowning at him long enough to stare down a toddler waving at her from a stroller, utterly perplexed to find someone who won’t wave back. Children apparently fall outside of the realm of things Audrey Parker is good at. “You’d be surprised how much time you spend inside churches when you’re with the Boston office though. You sorta get used to them.” 

“Not this one,” he tells her, grimly. 

He’s not wrong. 

Parker goes from _he doesn’t seem so bad_ to giving herself premature frown lines all before the Rev can get out the part about steering clear of the troubled and the ungodly. By then, Nathan is too busy seeing red and storming out to pay much attention to her. 

Outside, his fingers shake against the railing, and he flexes them a few times in a futile effort to get them to stop before he shoves them in his pockets. It’s a posture that wouldn’t be out of place on a sullen teenager, and Parker doesn’t look too impressed when she inevitably chases after him. That’s fine. He’d rather she think he went outside to sulk than anything closer to the truth.

“The troubled and the ungodly,” she muses, after she’s done giving him the third degree for failing to mention that he’s got a history with the Rev. “Why do I feel like he wasn’t talking about avoiding the town drunks?”

“Because he _is_ the town drunk.”

She doesn’t laugh.

Nathan sighs. “Because he’s not.”

“But you know what he means.” 

He nods. 

“Alright,” Parker says, warily. She mirrors his pose against the railing, arms crossed instead of her hands shoved into her pockets. “Does that mean you’re gonna share with the class or do I have to guess?”

It’s a nice day out. Sunny. Warm. Not quite the unseasonable cold snap of a week ago. He’s not sure it would be anything of the sort if she hadn’t shown up. “People like Marion.” 

Parker’s sharp. She can do the math. He didn’t make a show of leaving mid-sermon out of sympathy for Marion Caldwell alone, and she probably suspected as much already. “People like you,” she says, looking to him for confirmation. He manages a shrug. He doesn’t trust his voice to be even right now; not feeling the potential lump in your throat has its downsides. “Okay. So he’s - ”

“An asshole?” 

“Callous.” 

He grumbles; the descriptor is too kind, if you ask him. 

She isn’t. “He might be callous and, frankly, that felt more like a cult gathering than a run-of-the-mill baptism, but what’s important here is whether he had anything to do with what happened at the Rust Bucket. Which is what we’re here for. You think you can try and remember that?”

The shrug he gives her is even less committal than the last one.

“That’s the best I’m gonna get, isn’t it?” 

“Probably.”

She huffs a sigh. 

 

 

He does not make a scene. 

For the most part, he keeps his mouth shut and his arms stiff by his sides. Lets the Rev hang himself when the kindly small town pastor act fails to land and he’s forced to turn to something a little more sinister. 

“You ever hear the saying ‘you’ll catch more flies with honey’, Agent Parker?” the Rev calls, as they’re leaving. Parker slows to a stop but doesn’t bother to turn around - _you’re not from here, so I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt_ is apparently a flavor of condescension that’s left her a little cold - and Nathan falls in line beside her. “You’d do well to mind my sermon. I think you’ll find you’ll have an easier time in this town if you do.” 

Nathan doesn’t need to be looking at the Rev to know his gaze is directed square at the back of his head. 

“The troubled and the ungodly, right?” Parker echoes, an undercurrent of derision running through it that almost makes him smile. The Rev doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. “Maybe you should take your own advice,” she says, looking him dead in the eye. “Because, right now, all I’m hearing is a lot of vinegar.” 

 

 

The rickety church doors creak shut behind them.

“Thought I was the one you - ”

Parker holds up a hand. “Not a word.” 

Nathan hooks his thumbs in his pockets, more amused than he has any right to be. Which is a first when it comes to ending an encounter with the Rev. 

“Actually, wait,” she says, steps faltering. “You and the daughter were making eyes at each other, what was that about?” 

“We weren’t making eyes - ”

“Uh huh, that’s cute. You can tell me all about it in the car.” 

Nathan groans. 

 

 

He expects Duke to call.

Failing that, he expects him to text, some attempt at reestablishing contact. It’s their routine. Duke comes back and baits him with dinner - local fare usually, from wherever Duke’s been on his travels; tempura-battered soft shell crabs from Baltimore, breakfast-for-dinner featuring blueberry pancakes and dark amber maple syrup from Quebec - and Nathan sighs in relief over having an excuse handed to him. 

Except that doesn’t happen. 

Instead, he spends the whole day pretending not to care - 

(“Ow, shit,” Parker hisses, rubbing the elbow she’d banged into the car door half a second ago. “Why the hell is your volume up that high?” 

The number on his phone reads ‘unknown’. Telemarketer, probably. He sighs, trying to shove it back in his pocket around the seatbelt whilst keeping his eyes on the road. It does not go well. “Can’t keep it on vibrate if I can’t feel it.” 

“You’re numb not deaf,” she says. “You know, I could arrest you for screwing around with your phone while driving.” 

“Not in this state you can’t.”)

\- and then finds himself parked at the docks after nightfall. Duke’s truck remains where he left it, stuff still piled in the back. Toolkits and jumper cables, a spare can of paint, a rolled up blanket tucked into one corner. Duke’s always hated being cold. Whenever he’d talk about traveling it would always be to some tropical climate, Costa Rica or Thailand, Manila or Kuala Lumpur. It all always seemed awfully far away to Nathan. At fifteen and at thirty-five.

Duke’s number goes straight to voicemail. He lets himself try it, just once, fuck pride and all that, but he’s either turned his phone off or is still too far out to sea to pick up a signal. Nathan isn’t sure which is the preferable answer. Any answer, maybe. 

He watches the horizon for a while longer, propped up against the hood of his truck, and then he goes home. Hours later, he clips his knee on the coffee table, startled awake by his phone clamoring to life, and in his sleep-stupor he almost gets that hit of relief before Parker’s muffled cries register.

 

 

“Is this gonna be one of those things you try to convince me is normal in Haven?” Parker asks, in the middle of pulling on seemingly every layer of clothing she can reasonably manage. “Because the travel brochure I read didn’t say anything about complementary surprise cocooning.” 

“Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.” 

The towel she throws at him bounces harmlessly off his chest. “You know what, laugh all you want but the Rev had a sizable butterfly collection in his office. I get on his bad side and suddenly I’m seeing butterflies at night and getting cocooned by a blanket. That’s not a coincidence.” 

“He’s not - ” _troubled_ , Nathan mentally finishes. He’d known that even when he was a kid; it was a point of pride for the Driscolls. “He wouldn’t spend so much time up on his soapbox if he was like that.”

She eyes him suspiciously. “You can say it.” 

“Say what?” 

“Troubled. He’s not troubled.” She plops down on the bed and shoves her feet into her boots. Practical footwear. A long way from the heels she’d shown up in. “I’ve cracked your super secret code already. And you didn’t think Marion was troubled either until the weather patterns started syncing up with her emotions.” 

“That’s different.” 

“How?” 

“She’s not from around here.” 

The Hastings family moved north from Georgia in the fifties. Parker had told him as much back at the hospital. There weren’t any freak wind storms or blankets of fog when he was a kid either. There had been snow, mostly, no more or less than the usual Maine winters; he always seems to remember it streaked with red. “So it does run in families.”

He nods. 

“But your dad can feel just fine.” 

“Doesn’t work that way,” he says. “It’s not everyone. Just us lucky few.” Her gaze softens. It makes his drop altogether, again. He doesn’t want pity. He’s never wanted pity. “The Driscolls have been here for centuries. If it were him doing this, I’d know it already.” 

She gives him a dubious look and for a long moment he’s sure she’s gonna push this, barely seven in the morning with no coffee in either of them, but then she sighs. Centering herself. “Alright. Fine. This is your town, you know the lay of it better than I do. If the Rev’s not the one who’s doing this that still doesn’t mean he’s not involved somehow.”

“Don’t think he’s gonna be very responsive,” Nathan says. 

“I didn’t say anything about talking to _him_.”

 

 

Hannah volunteers at the food bank on Wednesdays.

With school out for the summer, that means Bobby does too, and Nathan dutifully runs interference so that Parker can work whatever angle it is that had her chomping at the bit the whole car ride over. He isn’t great with kids, not even when he was one, but he plies him with sugary soda and tries to seem more easygoing and less like - well, a cop. In return, he gets a picture painted for him about the Rev’s tendency to fly into a drunken rage, only Bobby calls them _moods_ , either out of respect for his pseudo-patriarch or because he doesn’t know any better.

Either way, it’s no kind of surprise to Nathan. He was pulling that shit with Hannah when they were in high school. It was one of the few times Nathan found himself grateful for the Chief, who was a pain in the ass who did his own fair share of yelling but was no kind of drunk, violent or otherwise.

It’s also not a surprise when Parker comes to relieve him with frustration written all over her face, the set of her shoulders as she leans against the hood of his truck. “Is this going to happen literally every time I try to talk to anyone here?” 

“She shut down on you?”

“Yes.” 

“You want me to talk to her?” he asks.

“No,” she says, a little petulantly. “Maybe. I think she thought I was judging her for not breaking away from her father. Which I’m not. Mostly.” 

“We have history,” he starts. 

She laughs. “Yeah, naked history.” 

He makes a face.

“It’s like a running theme,” she carries on, in spite of him. “First Duke, now Hannah. Next it’ll be the barista who served us coffee.” 

Nathan doesn’t bother to point out that she’s already met the only two people he’s ever had sex with because that would be encouraging a whole other line of questioning. “She was like twenty-five.”

“So unless they’re Haven High class of ‘94 they’re out of luck?”

He gives her the blankest of stares. “Do you want me to talk to her?” 

Parker drops her teasing edge with a sigh that sounds almost disappointed. Not over him, he thinks, but over having doors slammed in her face to the point that she’s forced to rely on him. He’s pretty sure she’s never had a partner before. “Go. Work your googly-eyed magic.” 

 

 

“You gonna be in trouble if the Rev sees us together?” 

Hannah smiles. They’re sorting donations being brought in by a pair of lanky teenagers a few years older than Bobby, tins of coffee and bags of rice in heavy cardboard boxes that Nathan lifts with ease while they talk. “I think he figured out you aren’t a threat a while ago.” 

“Would’ve been nice to know that in high school,” he says, cheekily. “Or college.”

She flushes a little, checking over her shoulder as she does. They’re alone, for the most part, in the back room where they seem to keep most of their reserves, but she still seems to feel the need to make sure of it. “I don’t mean it that way, I just mean - well, we were kids, and that was a long time ago.”

 

In other words, the Rev just hates him because of what he is, not because he thinks Nathan’s gonna make off with his daughter. 

“Besides, I barely saw you the whole time you were in college. Every school break you didn’t stay in Orono you were off with Duke Crocker gallivanting around in that truck of yours. God knows what you two got up to.” Nathan almost lets the box in his arms slip right out of them. Hannah doesn’t seem to notice. “Remember the bonfire down at Edgewater, the summer of sophomore year? Duke said you’d driven seven hours back from some island in Canada - ”

“Prince Edward.” 

“Yes. You do remember.” 

“I was pretty drunk,” he says, by way of explaining what he’s sure is coming next. That he spent the entire night glued to Duke’s side like a lost puppy. It’s embarrassing, in retrospect, but he really had been drunk off cheap whiskey. Nathan’s never had much of a tolerance, even then.

“Not as drunk as Geoff was. Ran into the water in nothing but his boxers only to realize halfway out that he never learned to swim.” He remembers that too. Duke and Bill Mcshaw coming back to shore sopping wet with a sputtering Geoff in between them, slurring up a blue streak. “When I got home that night, my father was waiting up for me. He wouldn’t speak to me for - days. Was always cracking the door to my bedroom open at night though, to make sure I was still there.” She blushes again, as if she hadn’t meant to tell that part. “Sorry. That probably sounds stupid.” 

“No, it doesn’t,” Nathan assures, shaking his head. “He still like that?”

Hannah shrugs. “You know how my father is, Nathan. He’s been this way for so long I don’t think he’ll ever change.” 

 

 

In the ensuing melee - watching the Rev roll clear of the car hood, a second before reaching for Parker and taking her down with him, the screeching of tires and shattering glass following in their wake - he swears he almost feels the slide of something against the flat of his palm, warm and wholly unfamiliar for all that he’s forgotten how to differentiate between sensations. 

Maybe it’s the jolt to the ground. Maybe it’s whatever magnetism caused the Rev to find himself stuck to that car hood. Maybe he imagined it.

“You alright?” Parker asks, a little breathless but back on her feet, brushing at the sleeve of her jacket while the Rev beats a hasty retreat back to his church. 

Nathan drags his fingers through blades of grass and feels nothing but absence. “‘m fine.”

 

 

“Was Hannah’s mother troubled?” 

Nathan stops driving the pad of his thumb into the point of his pen long enough to look up at her, lip caught between her teeth and notepad balanced on her knees. “You think the Rev would’ve married her if she were?” 

“Fair point,” Parker says. She crosses something out, then starts scribbling anew. She’d liberated that thing from the bottom drawer of his desk half an hour ago, when Otis the bartender had been here, and has managed to keep it angled out of his view ever since. “Maybe he didn’t know.”

“That she was - ” he glances at the door, still open a crack, and gets up to close it. Parker frowns at him, eyes tracking him all the way back to his desk. “That she was troubled?” 

“Mmhm.”

He shrugs. “Maybe.” 

“So that could mean Hannah is too.” 

Nathan groans. 

He doesn’t know what sounds less likely to him, that Hannah was embezzling from The Rust Bucket or that she’s Troubled and violently so. He’s never been all that certain about how Troubles activate but, for him, it’s been trauma of some sort, and he’d think if that were the case then her mother dying in a fiery car crash when they were seven would’ve done it. But Hannah was normal. She’s always been normal. Once upon a time, that was part of the problem.

“I know you don’t like it,” Parker says. 

“It’s not that.” 

“You’re not still carrying a torch for her, right?” 

He actually balks at that. “No.” 

“Then why are you so bothered by this?” she asks. “High school was a long time ago, Nathan. People change.”

He laughs, bitterly. “No, they don’t.”

“Well I think you just don’t like to be wrong.” 

“Excuse me?”

“You’re so sure you know exactly what’s going on in this town. You know who’s troubled and everyone else can’t possibly be because otherwise you would’ve heard about it already. Did you ever stop and think that maybe someone just wants you to believe you’re part of the cool kids club?”

“There’s no club.” 

“Then why’d you close the door just now?”

He finds he has no good comeback to that, at least not one that doesn’t sound like he’s giving her the brush-off. Not everyone here knows about the Troubles and not everyone here wouldn’t turn on their neighbor based on merely the accusation of having one. Meeting the Rev should be evidence enough of that. “It’s complicated.”

“I’m sure it is,” she says, “but in my experience? If you’re closing doors in someone’s face then there’s probably someone out there doing it to you too.”

 

 

Hannah’s bank records turn up a suspicious account in Bangor.

“It’s not like I wanted to be right,” Parker says, but she takes the stairs up to the Rev’s door two at a time, so he’s guessing she doesn’t mind being right very much either. It’d been her idea to go track down Hannah, apparently pretty damn sure her hunch was right, and Nathan didn’t even wait until they left the station to start grumbling. Hannah still lives with her father, and Nathan’s already hit his quota for interactions with the Rev this month. 

Especially ones where he’s drunk. 

The stench of scotch coming off of him when he opens the door is enough to make even Parker wince, and she hasn’t been ‘blessed’ with a heightened sense of smell like he has. Nathan’s seen this show a time or two, mostly when he was in high school, once when the Rev got rowdy over at The Pelican Inn and required a police escort out of the bar. He may not be a violent drunk, but he’s an unconscionably cruel one and Nathan knows better than to let himself linger there, half in the doorway with the Rev slumped on the stairs clutching the bottle, having decided keeping Parker out is more trouble than it’s worth, but he just - 

“The lion can never lie down with the lamb, Nathan,” the Rev says or, more aptly, slurs. It’s Biblical gibberish as far as he’s concerned but there’s a glint to the Rev’s eye that cuts like ice. “I’d thought you’d have learned that by now.” 

Parker lingers on the edges of his periphery, backed by a half dozen framed butterfly specimens that belong in a nature museum somewhere. Nathan shakes his head. “You’ve lost it.” 

“You walk alone but you think your shadow is the Lord’s,” the Rev carries on, unabated, and that word - _alone, alone, alone_ \- hits its intended target. His mouth tastes like acid, like bile. “The Lord cast you out - you made sure of that - and now you’re truly alone.”

It’s just this week. Twelve hour workdays spent in his office or, prior to yesterday, out on his own on a call, followed up by long nights in a too quiet house. He’s out of practice with being comfortable in his own solitude and maybe it’s for the best that he gets used to it again. 

Maybe he has no other option.

He steels himself to get down on the Rev’s level, both figuratively and literally - maybe he is alone, maybe that’s how he was always meant to be, but he isn’t a drunk who trades on turning people against each other for the sake of some false righteousness, and that damn sure makes him a better man than the one in front of him - except he doesn’t get that far before Parker collars him.

“Ok, let’s go,” she says, the force of her grip unsteadying him enough that he has no choice but to go or risk his footing. The Rev snickers into his half-empty glass and the white-hot rage that sound sends rushing over him almost has him trying to reverse course. It isn’t happening. Parker’s stronger than she looks. “Nathan. _Let’s go_.”

She doesn’t bother to close the door behind her. Nathan has to pay attention to the steps that lead down the walkway so he doesn’t trip over those too, but when they hit the curb he yanks his arm free, stumbling a little at the force of his own momentum. He catches himself with one hand on the mailbox but it isn’t graceful and it’s a last straw sort of thing that has him striking out at the post it’s attached to, hard enough to send it sideways an inch or two. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she snaps. 

“ _Me_?” 

“He was goading you.” 

“You think I don’t know that?” 

“So you were just gonna let him?”

Nathan doesn’t really know what he was going to do just then. Toss his moral superiority right back in his face initially, but that snicker - it sounded like school hallways and shame, and that’s a tough pill to swallow when coupled with everything else coming out of the Rev’s mouth. 

Parker sighs, frustration running out of her. “Look, no one drinks like that because they like the taste of alcohol. He’s hurting. And, yeah, he’s an asshole, you’re right about that one, but all you’re doing right now is giving him the satisfaction of being able to hurt someone else back.”

He scoffs, indignant. “How is this about what _I’m_ doing wrong? He’s the one who - ”

“Nathan,” she cuts him off. “You’re not alone.”

It hits like the punch the Rev was trying to deliver, the rest of his sentence catching in his throat only to bubble up in the form of a laugh that really isn’t one at all. He is alone. He’s still got the remnants of what he once had with Duke, and what he could’ve had with his father, but at the end of the day they’re just glimpses of the real thing. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

She looks like she has half a mind to argue with him but then thinks better of it, the sad downturn of her mouth smoothing out. “Fine, let’s just go. We need to get to that science fair.” 

Nathan nods. 

 

 

It’s Bobby who ends up the culprit.

He’s pretty sure no one saw that coming. 

Parker pulls the kid aside after their little road trip from hell ends with them parked outside Bobby’s family’s old cabin. It’s a private conversation, apparently, and Hannah seems to allow herself a few moments of unveiled discomfort with the situation before she shakes it off and busies herself making coffee. She apologizes like it’s a reflex, for her father and for Bobby, and somehow manages to make it sound like it’s all her fault. Nathan’s never noticed her tendency to absorb the blame for things out of her control before, though he supposes he should’ve after he had front row seats to her swearing up and down that she’d been the one to ask Nathan to prom and not the other way around. Hannah had been irked at him for interjecting, afterwards, told him it was just easier for everyone this way. 

He hadn’t understood it then and he’s still not sure he does now. 

“You know you have to leave him,” he says, sitting awkwardly at the kitchen table, one eye on the closed door he can hear Parker murmuring behind, the other on Hannah hunched over the gurgling coffeemaker. She looks like she’s getting about as much sleep as Bobby is. 

“I know,” she says, on a long tired sigh. “I always wanted to, you know? It was just never the right time. Guess I don’t really have a choice anymore.” 

Nathan can’t argue with that. Bobby is ‘one of his’ now, based on what Nathan was able to overhear of Parker’s conversation with the Rev when they went back for round two. By which he means she went back for round two and he waited by the door like he was told to, ostensibly in the hopes of avoiding another confrontation they didn’t have time for. “You could’ve come to me.”

“I was handling it,” she says. There’s a defiant note to it that Nathan doesn’t recognize at all. It’s been a long time since they were close, if they ever were at all. “I _am_ handling it. Maybe it’s not on everyone else’s timeline but - ” she breaks off with an exhale that’s shakier than he thinks she’d have preferred. “Well. It doesn’t matter anymore.” 

“Meant when we were kids,” he murmurs. Her eyes snap to his, just a little too wide. “Chief’s a pain in the ass but he’s good for that. Could’ve helped you get away from him, after.”

After her mother died, he doesn’t say.

After the Rev’s need for control found another, more convenient target, he presumes. One that wasn’t able to run away from him. 

“He’s just a drunk,” she says, like it’s nothing. “He’s not - he’s never been violent. More likely to hurt himself when he’s stumbling around than hurt me or Bobby. Broke one of my mother’s vases that way last year.” Her thin lips press impossibly thinner. “I would’ve left otherwise. Even when I was younger. I remember kids coming into school with black eyes and bruises and almost feeling - grateful.” She gives an uneasy laugh. “How terrible is that?” 

“Sure those weren’t just from the playground?” he asks, dryly.

She gives him a tight smile that’s more grim than amused. _You don’t get it_ , that smile says, with a hint of disappointment lurking at the corners. 

He doesn’t remember kids with black eyes. He remembers being on the receiving end of more than his own fair share of bruises courtesy of schoolyard bullies, right up until the fall of sixth grade when Duke threw a punch that knocked a kid’s front tooth loose and got suspended for a week. He can’t imagine he was the only one, much as Hannah’s looking at him like that isn’t the case. 

“Nathan, did you ever - ”

The moment breaks with the high-pitched beep of the coffeemaker. 

“Nevermind,” she says, shaking her head. “You take it black?” 

“Yeah.”

She stares at him a beat longer, mouth working soundlessly around something, before she turns her back on him and starts pulling down mugs out of the cabinet. 

 

 

It’s the wee hours of the morning by the time they pull up to the B&B. 

Parker unbuckles her seatbelt but doesn’t get out. 

“Are you gonna be okay?” she asks, hesitantly, like she’s not sure these are waters she wants to be wading into. They lost control of the truck and almost went over a guardrail at fifty miles an hour earlier, but this is the stuff that scares her. 

He rolls his eyes, good-naturedly. “I’m fine.” 

“You’re sure?” She sounds doubtful, pushing her sleeve up to get at her watch. “Because we could go get breakfast. I think. You guys have all-night diners here, right? That, at least, is a thing?”

It isn’t but something in him softens anyways. He leans over her, ignoring the sharp inhale of surprise, and unlatches the passenger side door. “Go get some sleep.”

She makes a face - probably at being told what to do, knowing her - but hops out with more energy than anyone has any right to, at this hour. The windows are rolled down and she leaves a hand on the frame so he can’t drive off, peering up at him. “You’re sure?”

He nods. “Go.” 

“Alright. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She frowns. “Or today, I guess.”

His interest piques. He’s still not sure how long she’s sticking around for. She’s already beaten his expectations by a week. “Case is finished.” 

“But, unfortunately, the paperwork isn’t.”

“Fair enough.” 

She gives him a goofy little salute. “Night, Detective.” 

“Goodnight.” 

He saves the smile for her retreating back, watching her fumble for her keys all the way to the second floor landing before he drives off.

 

 

Against his own advice, he doesn’t go home and sleep.

He eats oatmeal he doesn’t taste standing up in his kitchen and counts the hours he’s been awake, landing on twenty-three. He’s managed a lot longer than that. One of the benefits of exhaustion not quite presenting the same for him as everyone else. He checks his answering machine too, followed by his voicemail, but there’s nothing of note on either. No missed calls. 

_Tuesday, at the latest_ , Duke had said.

It’s Thursday. 

He knows what that means. Denial can only take him so far.

At six, he drives back out to the marina, only this time he doesn’t go as far as the docks. Instead, he parks outside the Harbour Master’s office. Beattie’s a morning person and her car is in the lot already, probably has been since the sun came up. She doesn’t even look all that surprised to see him walk in, just offers him a smile and a, “What can I do for you, Nathan?”

He doesn’t explain himself when he asks for her payment records and, to her credit, she doesn’t ask him to, just pulls a stack of binders out of the filing cabinet. They’re marked up in black sharpie, the forms inside filled out by hand. She’s the type to have a calculator ten years out of date sitting on her desk rather than a computer. It’s that way a lot of places here. He’s always found it charming.

“Looking for anything in particular?” she asks. 

“Dock rentals.” 

She gives him a look he finds strangely unsettling. “Alright then. Let’s see.” She flips through the third binder in the stack, past the watercraft rentals and the records for whose borrowed what equipment - apparently the system for that is a lot less formal, judging by how much all the forms look like IOUs - before she lands on the dock rentals. It’s not a terribly long list. They don’t exactly have an abundance of space after all, but trepidation creeps over him when she starts flipping pages ‘til she lands on Dock 27. 

“He’s paid up ‘til the end of the month,” she says, underlining the date with her index finger. His gaze settles on Duke’s name instead. Three years of payment history, all done month to month. He knows how rentals work here. Most people pay biannually or annually. Not Duke, apparently. 

Nathan feels a little sick suddenly. 

“Usually only pays a few days before it’s due,” she adds, her tone tacking on the unspoken _if it helps_ , and when he glances at her he can see something just short of sympathy. He tries his damndest to school his face into neutrality, which is no small task given that he can’t actually feel what his face is doing. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with seeing your truck parked here every morning, would it?” 

He’s really got to park his fucking truck somewhere else. First Parker, now Beattie. Next it’ll be The Chief, and then that relationship will _really_ be strained. 

Or maybe that won’t be a problem now. 

Six days. 

Duke has six days. 

“Thanks, Beattie,” he says. 

He never does answer her question. 

 

 

 

On Saturday morning, they help Hannah and Bobby haul their stuff to the cabin. 

They ‘borrow’ a van from the station - _you’re more fun than I thought_ , Parker tells him, all cheeky smiles and good humor, something he finds himself desperately needing - and he drives it up to Twin Pines once they’ve packed it up. He left his truck at the station but Parker tails them in her rental, with Hannah riding shotgun. They can only really fit two people in the van with it filled up like it is, but Bobby is easy enough company on the ride over. He doesn’t seem all that sad to see the Rev’s house disappear into the background as they drive away, his spirits picking up the further away they get.

Hannah offers to feed them, claiming it’s the least she can do after everything they’ve done, and Parker politely pretends she’s only talking about helping them move. At any rate, she turns down the offer, and they’re back at the station by eleven. Nathan spends twenty minutes alone in his office staring at his half-written report, trying and failing to focus on the task at hand, and then takes a walk. 

He’s by the water when Parker finds him, later. It’s not an overlong walk from the station, the ocean visible from the parking lot, and she lingers behind him for a few beats, just watching. Her footfalls give her away and he waits her out, waits for the exaggerated sigh that’s supposed to let him know she’s there. 

“Duke’s still not back yet, huh?” she asks.

Nathan’s starting to think he’s not as unreadable as he once assumed. He leans back against the bench, folding his hands, watching his thumbnail cut half moons into the skin of his palm. “No, he’s not.” 

She sits down next to him. “He’s running late, isn’t he?” Nathan grunts an affirmative. He figures he might as well. She’s just gonna guess at everything even if he does try to put her off. “Is this why you took what the Rev said so hard?”

He chances a glance at her and gets met with Audrey Parker Sympathy Face. But it’s not pity. At least there’s that. “No.” He pauses. “And yes.” 

“Well, I think he’ll be back.” 

Another grunt. “You don’t know Duke.” 

“Or maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do.” 

He’s tempted to tell her about the missing ten years, about waking up one morning to Duke’s boat no longer in harbor, no warning, no goodbye, no nothing. But it’s a raw wound, especially on a day like today, and he doesn’t think he can get through that story intact. He’s not sure he got through the decade that way either. 

“Your dad offered me a job,” she says, after he doesn’t offer up any sort of challenge. “Says he thinks I could do some good around here.” 

Nathan deliberately doesn’t let himself look at her. “He’s right.” 

“Yeah.” It’s more non-committal than he’d like to hear, at least it is until she adds, “I think I’m gonna take him up on it. Stick around. He jerked me around a bit for kicks but he says he’ll help me find out about my mother and, I don’t know,” she shrugs, “what do I have to lose?” 

“So you’re staying?”

“Guess so.” 

For the first time in over a week, he feels relief. It’s not the kind he expected, but it’s welcome all the same.

“Think you can put up with me for a while longer?” 

He smiles. “Think I’ll manage.” 

 

 

tbc.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Where is Duke? Let's all hope we don't have to wait several months to find out. 
> 
> (Thanks to anyone who stuck around while my writers block decided to become a writers block brick wall. More soon.)


End file.
